Trends and new practical applications for warehouse allocation and layout design: a literature review

Abstract Companies’ productivity is critical in contemporary warehouse environment to maintain efficiency and competitiveness within their supply chain. Warehousing operations are well known for their impact on the overall supply chain and need to be wisely managed. Among those activities, allocation planning and layout design are some of the most important concepts in practice. Current research tends to emphasize homogeneous environment, which leaves heterogeneous and non-standard cases with less attention, even today. This paper aims to review the literature regarding warehouse allocation planning and layout design methods that could suit practical industry problems, with a focus on heterogeneous and non-standard spare parts. It also aims to describe the current trends in these fields. Following a literature review methodology, a total of fifty-seven articles were reviewed to identify the methods developed and used. The reviewed papers were also investigated in order to identify research gaps and future directions. The analysis concluded that more research is needed to better understand and optimize heterogeneous and non-standard spare parts environments in terms of allocation and layout design. More practical case applications also remain a gap to address. Article highlights This article evaluates 8 concepts/parameters related to warehouse allocation operation. This is to ensure a deep analysis of heterogeneous and non-standard parts presence in literature. A research gap is identified regarding heterogeneous and non-standard parts in warehouse allocation and layout design methods in the scientific literature. This article evaluates 3798 scientific papers over a 20-year timeframe. From this, we present 57 methods and 8 gaps in scientific literature.